With the new washing machine now having done a couple of washes and no signs of water leaks I decided to move the old machine from the back of the house to the front ready to load into the car when my oldest boy has the time to help me. However there's a large step where the path round the side of the house comes out at my garage door. Even on my sack truck I couldn't drag it up over the step - damn and blast this getting older! It made me think though. My back is not good and my boy was medically retired from the Marines due to nerve damage in his back so maybe not such a good idea for us to be wrestling a heavy washing machine. I took it back to the rear of the house and sat on my bench for a wee while feeling a bit fed up.
Then I though, it's got to be the big lumps of concrete these things have in them, Maybe I can dismantle it and remove the concrete weights? Well. it proved considerably more complicated than I'd expected, I've had washing machines stripped down to replace pumps etc in the past, but never tried to completely dismantle one. However an hour or so later it was looking like this:
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I've temporarily stuffed the drum and other bits back inside just for storage until we make the trip to the centre. The ring and the long thing to it's left are the concrete weights. Even separately they are very heavy but now manageable. Although I could now manage a trip to the recycling centre on my own, my boy is still going to come down and give me a hand - If I'm honest, and swallow my pride, I'm actually quite glad he's going to come as I'd find the weights a challenge if I had to carry them any distance. It's been an interesting exercise in that I found the main reason for failure were the two shock absorbers which were absolutely destroyed, one literally falling apart. The pump was also noisy but the main motor seems Ok with no trace of rotor bearing wear and the com and brushes look good for a while yet. The multi V drive belt looks pristine! So I could have repaired it for quite a lot less than it's cost for a new one, but then again, how long might it have run before something else failed? Anyway, no point in thinking about it, it's done now and, at our age, the new one is likely to see us out!
There's always a silver lining though? So I've ended up with a small container of quite high quality fittings:
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Mrs J's immediate comment was "and why are you keeping all those"? She's probably right, but it's a disease most of us are incurably infected with isn't it?